Frey Freyday-Imagination

(Frey Freyday is simply a bunch of inspirational, motivational and other quotes meant to make you think, reflect, smile, even laugh a bit. Hopefully helpful, useful stuff….)

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Imagination is more important than knowledge.-Albert Einstein

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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.-Dr. Seuss

All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.-Brian Tracy

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To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.-Thomas A. Edison–

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.-Carl Sagan

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I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.-Michelangelo

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All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.-Orison Swett Marden

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Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.-Henry Miller

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If you can dream it, you can do it.-Walt Disney

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You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can’t imagine something that has never existed before, it’s impossible.-Rita Dove

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Live out of your imagination, not your history.-Stephen Covey

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WORD TO LIVE BY

im·ag·i·na·tion-[iˌmajəˈnāSHən] – the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses

Imagination is a wonderful thing. We can think of creative ways to propose to someone, think of fun ways to pull a practical joke on someone, we can think of ways to make our homes more inviting, our health and lives better, or we can imagine a vision for our future.

Also, and let’s face it, much of life and career is problem solving, right? Whether we’re in business, medicine, education, law, …whatever, we are solving a problem of some kind. We need to come up with a solution.

It should also be mentioned that the best solutions, the best imagination, does not come to us well when we’re in a state of mind of scarcity or fear. We need to be open to things, happy, relaxed, and in a good state of mind, and then we can imagine the solution. Laughter is good foreplay for imagination. Most of us adults don’t call it imagination, but that’s what we’re doing, we are imagining a way to solve the problem. There is creative financing, doctors are working with researchers to find new ways to beat cancer, communities are imagining new ways to revitalize older cities. There are lots of ways it happens….

Imagination can empower us or it can lead us down a weaker path. Here’s what I mean – worrying is a form of imagination – we can sit around and imagine bad things happening. That is almost always not useful. We can sit around and imagine good things happening. We can imagine or visually practice scenarios – visualize – things in our lives.

Imagination is something most adults seem to abandon – as children we would imagine anything was possible. As adults we automatically edit and censor ourselves, we limit ourselves.

If you look at so many great people – people in medicine, humanitarians, business, artists/directors/actors, and other ‘leaders’ in our world, they embrace their imagination.

What we need to remember is that if we can imagine it, we can often accomplish it. It may be hard, take time, effort and bring failures along the way but we can do it. The easy example is Walt Disney. What a great imagination he had. And, if you’re a realist, what a crazy imagination he had. Can you ‘imagine’ back before he built any parks? He imagined an amusement park like no other, so he had to buy thousands of acres in swamp areas of Florida, build places like Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, Experimental City of Tomorrow, and other crazy things. Can you picture yourself listening to that investors presentation decades ago when Walt was looking for money? “Um, gee Walt, that’s an interesting idea but I think I’ll wait and see how you do with it….” Today there is a huge empire of fun and fantasy. The vision lives on.

So many others have imagined a better world for hospitals, education, art, and communities. On Monday we celebrate a man that imagined a “Dream” for civil rights in the U.S.

I invite you to imagine your future-self as you hope you’ll be, a world full of love, fun, happiness, good health and prosperity.

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Frey Freyday was actually born out of something I created called “Words To Live By” (WTLB). Going forward, I will now not only share the quotes, as you may be used to receiving, but also a related (WTLB). In 1999, when we had our first daughter, I was contemplating how I would raise my new beautiful child, and I was thinking about how I can best educate her and my other children about values, morals, and other key thoughts about life. School offers education. Religion offers some values and morals. Parents offer most of it, sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally.

So I created a (WTLB) book, like a dictionary, which lists things like honesty, love, persistence, etc. with a definition that I created, with my wife’s input. I then turned it into a workbook with one word per page and space below for notes. For years we would discuss with my two daughters and they would draw pictures and make notes in the blank space. I may share some of those images with you. As they got older, they were less inclined to draw and more open to quotes and references from adults, hence where Frey Freyday came from….

About this talk: Shakespeare boasted an uncanny understanding of human nature. Might the Bard be a helpful workplace consultant with tips on navigating the plot twists and characters taking stage in the modern world? Want to learn whom you can trust at work? Take a meeting with Othello. Need advice on creative problem solving? Check in with Hamlet. John Bolton walks us through five lessons from the Bard that still resonate today.